Broken Link Checker vs Dr. Link Check: Extension or Site Crawler?
This is not a fair fight, and that's the point. Broken Link Checker is a free Chrome extension that tests the page in front of you; Dr. Link Check is a cloud service that crawls your whole site on a schedule. People search for "X vs Y" expecting a winner, but these two tools answer different questions — "are the links on this page okay right now?" versus "did anything break anywhere on my site since last week?". Here's what each actually does, what Dr. Link Check costs, and which question you should be paying to answer.
The 30-second summary
- Broken Link Checker: free forever, runs in your browser, scans the current page in seconds, nothing leaves your computer. No scheduling, no whole-site crawl.
- Dr. Link Check: crawls an entire site from a start URL, re-checks on a daily/weekly/monthly schedule, adds extras like malware-blacklist and SSL checks. Free up to 1,500 links per site; paid plans from $13/month.
- The realistic answer for most site owners is both: the free extension while you write and edit, a crawler (Dr. Link Check or any competitor) if your site is big enough that manual checks can't cover it.
Head to head
| Broken Link Checker | Dr. Link Check | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Chrome extension | Web service (cloud crawler) |
| Scope per run | The page you're viewing | Whole site from a start URL |
| Price | Free, no limits, no account | Free up to 1,500 links; $13/mo (10k), $49/mo (50k), $159/mo (200k links) |
| Scheduled monitoring | ❌ | ✅ daily / weekly / monthly |
| Instant check while editing | ✅ one click, results in seconds | ❌ crawls take time, run server-side |
| Works on pages behind login / localhost / staging | ✅ anything your browser can open | ⚠️ only what its crawler can reach |
| Bot-blocked links separated from broken | ✅ "blocked" category | ⚠️ detects soft errors; 403s from bot-hostile sites can still need review |
| Malware / blacklist checking | ❌ | ✅ |
| SSL certificate checks | ❌ | ✅ |
| CSV export | ✅ | ✅ |
| Privacy | All checks run locally; no data uploaded | Your URL list is processed on their servers |
What a page-level extension gives you that a crawler can't
- Speed at the moment of writing. You're about to publish an article with 30 sources. One click, ten seconds, every link verified — including the bot-blocked ones labeled honestly instead of as false alarms. No crawler fits into that loop; by the time a scheduled crawl reports the problem, the article has been live for a week.
- Anything your browser can open. Staging environments, pages behind a login, localhost, intranet wikis — a cloud crawler can't reach them without special setup; an extension checks them like any other page, and nothing about those private pages leaves your machine.
- Zero budget conversations. Free means the intern, the freelancer, and the client can all run the same check without a seat license.
What a crawler gives you that an extension can't
Fairness requires the reverse list, and it's just as real:
- Coverage. A 2,000-page site can't be checked page by page, ever. A crawler starts at your homepage and follows every internal link until it has tested the whole graph — that's the job, and an extension doesn't do it.
- The calendar. External links die on other people's schedules — roughly 38% of pages per decade. A weekly scheduled crawl notices without anyone remembering to check.
- Extras per link. Dr. Link Check also flags links that appear on malware/phishing blacklists, expired SSL certificates, and "200 OK" pages that are actually error pages in disguise (soft 404s) — checks that go beyond "does it resolve".
The pricing reality check
Dr. Link Check's free tier covers 1,500 links per site. That sounds like a lot, but a "link" here is every checked URL across every crawled page — a modest blog with a linked header and footer burns through 1,500 fast. Budget realistically: small sites fit the free tier, most active business sites land in the $13/month Standard plan, and content-heavy sites need $49/month Professional. Whether that's worth it depends entirely on whether anyone acts on the reports — a subscription that emails an ignored CSV every Monday is the most common way to spend money on broken links without fixing any. (What acting on them looks like: the repair playbook.)
The workflow that actually works
- While writing and editing: scan the page with the extension before publish. Broken links never ship.
- Monthly (or weekly for large sites): whole-site pass — Dr. Link Check if the extras justify it, or the free alternatives (Search Console's 404 report, other crawlers) covered in how to find broken links.
- After every migration or redesign: both — crawl for coverage, then spot-check key pages by hand, because internal links break by your hand and migrations are where it happens.
Verdict
Don't pick — sequence. Start with the free extension; it solves the editing-time problem completely and costs nothing. Add a scheduled crawler the day your site outgrows what you can check by hand — that's usually around the point where new content ships weekly and old content is measured in hundreds of pages. If you're choosing a crawler, Dr. Link Check's free 1,500-link tier is a reasonable way to find out whether scheduled reports fit your routine before paying for one.